The history of cinema has been dominated by the discovery and testing of the paradoxes inherent in the medium itself.

The motion picture was developed in the 1890s from the union of still photography, which records physical reality, with the persistence-of-vision toy, which made drawn figures appear to move. Four major movie traditions have developed since then: fictional narrative movie, which tells stories about people with whom an audience can identify because their world looks familiar; nonfictional documentary movie, which focuses on the real world either to instruct or to reveal some sort of truth about it; animated movie, which makes drawn or sculpted figures look as if they are moving and speaking; and experimental movie, which exploits movie's ability to create a purely abstract, nonrealistic world unlike any previously seen.

Cinema is considered the youngest art form and has inherited much from the older and more traditional arts. Like the novel, it can tell stories; like the drama, it can portray conflict between live characters; like painting, it composes in space with light, color, shade, shape, and texture; like music, it moves in time according to principles of rhythm and tone; like dance, it presents the movement of figures in space and is often underscored by music; and like photography, it presents a two-dimensional rendering of what appears to be 3-dimensional reality, using perspective, depth, and shading.

Cinema, however, is one of the few arts that is both spatial and temporal, intentionally manipulating both space and time. This synthesis has given rise to two conflicting theories about movie and its historical development. Some theorists, such as S.M. Eisenstein and Rudolf Arnheim, have argued that movies must take the path of the other modern arts and concentrate not on telling stories or representing reality but on investigating time and space in a pure and consciously abstract way. Others, such as Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, maintain that cinema must fully and carefully develop its connection with nature so that it can portray human events as excitingly and revealingly as possible.

Because of his fame, his success at publicizing his activities, and his habit of patenting machines before actually inventing them, Thomas Edison received most of the credit for having invented the motion picture; as early as 1887, he patented a motion picture camera, but this could not produce images. In reality, many inventors contributed to the development of moving pictures. Perhaps the first important contribution was the series of motion photographs made by Eadweard Muybridge between 1872 and 1877. Hired by the governor of California, Leland Stanford, to capture on film the movement of a racehorse, Muybridge tied a series of wires across the track and connected each one to the shutter of a still camera. The running horse tripped the wires and exposed a series of still photographs, which Muybridge then mounted on a stroboscopic disk and projected with a magic lantern to reproduce an image of the horse in motion. Muybridge shot hundreds of such studies and went on to lecture in Europe, where his work intrigued the French scientist E.J. Marey, who devised a means of shooting motion photographs with what he called a photographic gun.

Besides, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson made a major breakthrough when he decided to use George Eastman's celluloid film instead. Celluloid was tough but supple and could be manufactured in long rolls, making it an excellent medium for motion photography, which required great lengths of film.
Between 1891 and 1895, Dickson shot many 15-second films using the Edison camera, or Kinetograph, but Edison decided against projecting the films for audiences - in part because the visual results were inadequate and in part because he felt that motion pictures would have little public appeal. Instead, Edison marketed an electrically driven peep-hole viewing machine (the Kinetoscope) that displayed the marvels recorded to one viewer at a time.

Edison thought so little of the Kinetoscope that he failed to extend his patent rights to England and Europe an oversight, that allowed two Frenchmen, Louis and Auguste Lumiere, to manufacture a more portable camera and a functional projector, the Cinematographe, based on Edison's machine.
The movie era might be said to have begun officially on Dec. 28, 1895, when the Lumieres presented a program of brief motion pictures to a paying audience in the basement of a Paris cafe. English and German inventors also copied and improved upon the Edison machines, as did many other experimenters in the United States. By the end of the 19th century vast numbers of people in both Europe and America had been exposed to some form of motion pictures.

The earliest films presented 15 to 60-second glimpses of real scenes recorded outdoors (workmen, trains, fire engines, boats, parades, soldiers) or of staged theatrical performances shot indoors. These two early tendencies - to record life as it is and to dramatize life for artistic effect - can be viewed as the two dominant paths of film history.

Georges Melies was the most important of the early theatrical filmmakers. A magician by trade, Melies, in such films as A Trip to the Moon (1902), showed how the cinema could perform the most amazing magic tricks of all: simply by stopping the camera, adding something to the scene or removing something from it, and then starting the camera again, he made things seem to appear and disappear. Early English and French filmmakers such as Cecil Hepworth, James Williamson, and Ferdinand Zecca also discovered how rhythmic movement (the chase) and rhythmic editing could make cinema's treatment of time and space more exciting.

The era of the talking film began in late 1927 with the enormous success of Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer. The first totally sound film, Lights of New York, followed in 1928. Although experimentation with synchronizing sound and picture was as old as the cinema itself (Dickson, for example, made a rough synchronization of the two for Edison in 1894), the feasibility of sound film was widely publicized only after Warner Brothers purchased the Vitaphone from Western Electric in 1926.

The original Vitaphone system synchronized the picture with a separate phonographic disk, rather than using the more accurate method of recording (based on the principle of the oscilloscope) a sound track on the film itself. Warners originally used the Vitaphone to make short musical films featuring both classical and popular performers and to record musical sound tracks for otherwise silent films (Don Juan, 1926). For The Jazz Singer, Warners added four synchronized musical sequences to the silent film.

The silent film was dead within a year.
The conversion to synchronized sound caused serious problems for the film industry. Sound recording was difficult; cameras had to shoot from inside glass booths; studios had to build special soundproof stages; theaters required expensive new equipment; writers had to be hired who had an ear for dialogue; and actors had to be found whose voices could deliver it. Many of the earliest talkies were ugly and static, the visual images serving merely as an accompaniment to endless dialogue, sound effects, and musical numbers. Serious film critics mourned the passing of the motion picture, which no longer seemed to contain either motion or picture.

The most effective early sound films were those that played most adventurously with the union of picture and sound track. Walt Disney in his cartoons combined surprising sights with inventive sounds, carefully orchestrating the animated motion and musical rhythm.

Ernst Lubitsch also played very cleverly with sound, contrasting the action depicted visually with the information on the sound track in dazzlingly funny or revealing ways. By 1930 the U.S. film industry had conquered both the technical and the artistic problems involved in using sight and sound harmoniously, and the European industry was quick to follow.

A motion-picture projector projects the sequence of picture frames, contained on a ribbon of film, in their proper order. A claw engages perforations in the film and pulls the film down into the film gate, placing each new frame in exactly the same position as the preceding one. The frame is projected onto the screen by illuminating it with a beam of light. The period of time between the projection of each still image when no image is projected is normally not noticed by the viewer.

Two perceptual phenomena - persistence of vision and the critical flicker frequency - cause a continuous image.
Persistence of vision is the ability of the viewer to retain or in some way remember the impression of an image after it has been withdrawn from view.
The critical flicker frequency is the minimum rate of interruption of the projected light beam that will not cause the motion picture to appear to flicker. A frequency above about 48 interruptions a second will eliminate flicker.

Like a still camera, a movie camera shoots each picture individually. The movie camera, however, must also move the film precisely and control the shutter, keeping the amount of light reaching the film nearly constant from frame to frame. The shutter is essentially a circular plate rotated by an electric motor.

Photographic materials must be manufactured with great precision. The perforations, or holes in the film, must be precisely positioned. The pitch - the distance from one hole to another - must be maintained by correct film storage.

By the late 1920s, a sound-on-film system of synchronous sound recording was developed and gained widespread popularity. In this process, the sound is recorded separately on a machine synchronized with the picture camera. Unlike the picture portion of the film, the sound portion is recorded and played back continuously rather than in intermittent motion. Although editing still makes use of perforated film for flexibility, a more modern technique uses conventional magnetic tape for original recording and synchronizes the recording to the picture electronically.

If the number of photographs projected per unit time (frame rate) differs from the number produced per unit time by the camera, an apparent speeding up or slowing down of the normal rate is created. Changes in the frame rates are used occasionally for comic effect or motion analysis.

Cinematography becomes an art when the filmmaker attempts to make moving images that relate directly to human perception, provide visual significance and information, and provoke emotional response.

Although in the silent era small, independent producers were common, by the 1930s, in the so-called golden age of Hollywood, the overwhelming majority of films were produced, distributed, and exhibited by one of the large California studios. Led by MGM, Paramount, RKO, 20th-Century-Fox, Warner Brothers, Columbia, and Universal, the industry enjoyed the benefits of total vertical integration: because the studios owned their own theater chains, they could require theater managers to charge fixed minimum admission rates, to purchase groups of pictures rather than single releases (block booking), and to accept movies without first previewing them (blind buying). For more than two decades the major studios completely controlled their contracted stars, managed vast indoor and outdoor studio sets, and in general profited from what amounted to a virtual monopoly of the industry.

Shortly after World War II, three factors contributed to the loss of the majors' hegemony.
First, a number of federal court decisions forced the studios to end discriminatory distribution practices, including block booking, blind selling, and the setting of fixed admission prices; in 1948 the Supreme Court ordered divestiture of their theater chains.
Second, the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated the industry, which responded by blacklisting several prominent screenwriters and directors - an action that called into question the industry's reliability as a promoter of unfettered creative talent.
Third, television began to deprive Hollywood of large segments of its audience, and the industry reacted timidly and late to the possibilities for diversification presented by the new medium.
The effects of these developments were immediate and long lasting.

By the late 1960s the major studios had entered a grave economic slump, for many of their big picture gambles fell through. In response to this devastation of its profits, the industry underwent a profound organization. The majors backed away from production (since its cost had contributed heavily to their decline) and restructured themselves as loan guarantors and distributors. At the same time, most of them became subsidiaries of conglomerates such as Gulf and Western, Kinney National Service, and Transamerica and began to look to television sales and recording contracts for the revenues that previously had come from the theater audience alone.

Working with the conglomerates and accepting the reality of a permanently reduced market, private promoters have partially succeeded in revitalizing the industry.
The rise of independent production has been accompanied by diversification of subject matter, with close attention to the interests of specialized audiences. This trend, which began in the 1950s as an attempt to capture the art house audience and the youth market, is evident today in the success of martial-arts, rock-music, pornographic, documentary, and black-culture films. Simultaneously, production has moved away from the Hollywood sets and toward location filming.

For many producers, New York City has become the New filmmakers' Mecca, while shooting in foreign countries, where cheap labor is often plentiful, has given the modern film a new international texture; foreign markets have also become increasingly important.
Both geographically and financially, therefore, the film industry has begun to recapture some of the variety and independence that were common in the days before studio control.

The photographic movie, however, was first used as a means of investigation rather than of theatrical illusion.
The kinetoscope was invented either by Thomas Alva Edison or by his assistant William K. L. Dickson, both of whom had experimented originally with moving pictures as a supplement to the phonograph record. They later turned to George Eastman, who provided a flexible celluloid film base to store the large number of images necessary to create motion pictures.

The mechanical means of cinematography were gradually perfected. It was discovered that it was better to display the sequence of images intermittently rather than continuously. This technique allowed a greater presentation time and more light for the projection of each frame.

Another improvement was the loop above and below the film gate in both the camera and the projector, which prevented the film from tearing.

By the late 1920s, synchronized sound was being introduced in movies. These sound films soon replaced silent films in popularity. To prevent the microphones from picking up camera noise, a portable housing was designed that muffled noises and allowed the camera to be moved about.

In recent years, equipment, lighting, and film have all been improved, but the processes involved remain essentially the same.